Housing policy, fossil fuels, and community gardening may seem unrelated, but too often they have one thing in common. When a housing policy not only groups together people of color, but also places those people in close proximity to particulate-matter pollution, that is racism and injustice in action. When oil pipelines bisect Native American reservations, that is racism and injustice in action. When communities of color in Oakland, California are forced out of their neighborhoods due to gentrification and separated from the food sources they rely on, that is racism and injustice in action. 

There is nuance in injustice. The intersections of poverty and race place people of color and people living below the poverty line in vulnerable environmental situations. However, in the United States, Black and Hispanic people disproportionately experience the burdens of environmental injustice, even when education and income are accounted for. At this point, race is a stronger determinant of whether a person will be exposed to pollution than poverty.  

In recent history, the protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline and the Keystone XL Pipeline brought native issues of environmental injustice to the forefront of U.S. media. At face value, the choice to construct pipelines through Native American Reservations is an issue of environmental injustice. When looked at through the lens of environmental racism, the long history of land grabbing and marginalization of indigenous people in the United States can be further critiqued over its centuries of systematic disenfranchisement. 

Industry often functions at the expense of communities of color. The pollution resulting from industry can come in the form of atmospheric particulate matter pollution, the poisoning of water from lead pollution, and the ambient noise that results from increased industrial activity. All of these issues broadly affect people of color at disparate rates and can be solved by targeted policies that serve to protect marginalized communities from the effects of pollution.

Issues with elements of environmental racism serve as key examples of how powerful information can be in the fight against injustice. My exploration of environmental racism will reveal the history of the environmental justice movement, the dimensions of racism that exist in many facets of environmental injustice, and dig into recent studies pertaining to environmental racism.